How to Setup a Blog using Blogger(Blogspot)

Important Notice: Written in 2020, Last Updated; September 5, 2023. We'll keep trying our best to make this article up to date. However, you can refer to our comments section for correction, opinions and notifications. Thanks.

Hi guys,my name is temmy. And in this tutorial I will show you how to create blog website with blogger "blogspot" with easy step by step pictures.

Note that before creating a blog, niche should be your number one priority. Niche is what you blog about e g photography,sport,entertainment etc. Now let talk about today's business.

How to create a blog using blogger

1. Firstly,you have to create a google account. Then go to www.blogspot.com on your browser.

2. It will land you to this page. Then enter create your blog.

3. Secondly, show the google account you want to use.

4. Thirdly, enter your display name and your blog address as show below

5. Note that your blog address can only be subdomain when signing up for blogger. So,after you have signed in,your dashboard will come up and you are ready to write and publish your article.

Installation of free XML template in blogger

Sometimes, blogspot template may not contain some essential widgets your blog may needs and may look old with the designing alignment. So you can go further to download free XML template. So, to do that;

• Go to btemplete.com on your browser.

• View demo to check how it will look on your blog. Then click on the template you would love to use.
• Click on free download

• Download the template and open with HTML file opening apps. meanwhile,I use WPS apps to open mine.
• After you've download and unzipped the file, proceed and sign in to your blogger account, go to themes and click back/restore, click choose file,

• Select the unzipped XML template file and click upload.
• Let it load, wow your template is online. so you can proceed in arranging your layout to your choice.

How to show missing widget in mobile

Many widget may not show on mobile browser due to default settings of the template of blogger blog. Only header, blog, AdSense, attribution, pagelist will show by default. In this article, I will show you how to enable your widget on mobile devices.

First ensure you have enabled show mobile template on mobile device ,to do that,

• login to your blogger, go to themes
• Select the gear icon showing the mobile template preview
• Click yes "show mobile template on mobile device"

• Now, you will add mobile 'yes' attribute to the tag widget inside the template HTML. Eg

Type mobile 'yes inside 

So it look like this

How to Create a unique page in blogger

Creating a unique page is one of the major reason website look beautiful and easy to navigate.

In blogger blog, page is one of the difficulty blogger user experience in designing there website. Blogspot page is useful to just create pages like 'about','contact us'. But to create a page that looks like this

Will really be difficult for some people.

Creating a unique page doesn't take much time but differs on types of template design but all template really use label for there back bone.

How can I create a unique page

1. Sign in to your blogger account
2. Select blog of same categories you want in a page
3. Click on label icon above
4. Create and name label  eg "News".

You can create as many label as you want to categorize your blog.

Now,after labels as been created, go further to create page. You can create your page depending on your template design.

If your template layout have main menu gadget

Follow this step, go-to your site url, click label you want use as page. Let it load and copy the label url.

• Sign in to blogger
• Go to layout
• Click main menu 
• Select add new link and paste the copied url and name it as your page.

What if main menu is not in my template layout design? There is nothing to be worried about, all you have to do is;

• Sign in to blogger
• Click on layout
• Add new gadget
• Select page on add new gadget
• Copy label link as explained above and paste it to add external link on page ,name it 

• And make it visible

How to add "about page" to blogger

"About us" page is a very essential page in website. People know more about website in this page. In this tutorial, I will show you how you can create "about is " page in blogger blog.

• Firstly, sign in to blogger.
• Go to page
• Create page and name it "About us"
• Write your passion on "About us"

• Publish it and view it.

• Copy the "About us " page url

• Name it and Paste it in main menu gadget in your layout or in page gadget in layout.

Or

How to write robots.txt file for SEO optimization in blogger

What is Blogger/Blogspot Robot Txt File?

Robots.txt file is a simple line of some code that tell web crawler where to crawl and index. That simply means you can retreat any blog on your site to show by search engine. And know that crawler scan robot.txt file before crawling anything on your website. 

Robots.txt file on blogger

Each blog hosted on blogger has it default robots.txt file that looks like this

[User-agent: Mediapartners-Google

Disallow :

User-agent: *

Disallow:/Search

Allow:/

Sitemap:

http://www.example.blogspot.com/feeds/post/default?

Orderby=UPDATE]

How does this code works?

As you can see,this code is divided in to three stage. The first which is 

user-agent: MediaPartner-Google 

Disallow 

It allow google to automatically run ads on your website so I advice to leave it unchanged.

User-agent: *

Disallow:/search

Allow:/

It allow all search bot or crawler to crawl and index your site due to the (*) on top of user-agent and Disallow:/search mean the link having SEARCH will be ignore by search engine.

Moreso, if you remove Disallow:/search from the above code then crawlers will access our entire blog to index and crawl all of its content and web pages.

Here Allow: / refers to the Homepage that means web crawlers can crawl and index our blog’s homepage.

How to Disallow Particular Post

Now suppose if we want to exclude a particular post from indexing then we can add below lines in the code.

Disallow: /yyyy/mm/post-url.html

Here yyyy and mm refers to the publishing year and month of the post respectively. For example if we have published a post in year 2013 in month of March then we have to use below format.

Disallow: /2013/03/post-url.html

To make this task easy, you can simply copy the post URL and remove the blog name from the beginning.

How to Disallow Particular Page

If we need to disallow a particular page then we can use the same method as above. Simply copy the page URL and remove blog address from it which will something look like this:

Disallow: /p/page-url.html

Sitemap:

http://www.example.blogspot.com/feeds/post/default?Orderby=UPDATE]

This show your site latest update and it can only show your 25 latest post. You can change it to 500 by adding this simple code.

Sitemap: http://example.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500

Adding robots.txt file

Follow the step below to add robots.txt file

• Go to your blogger blog.
• Navigate to Settings >> Search Preferences ›› Crawlers and indexing ›› Custom robots.txt ›› Edit ›› Yes
• Nowpaste your robots.txt file code in the box.
• Click on Save Changes button.
• You are done! 

How you can check your robots txt file.

You can check this file on your blog by adding /robots.txt at the end of your blog URL in the web browser. For example:

http://www.yourblogurl.blogspot.com/robots.txt

Once you visit the robots.txt file URL you will see the entire code which you are using in your custom robots.txt file.

How to add meta description in blogger

Meta description is most important to blog as it help search engine to know the content of blog. And also help improving our rank in search engine as it is show as snippet in search engine result.

Now after knowing the important and usefulness of meta description, let's move to how you can add meta description to your blogger blog.

Allowing meta description in blogger blog.

• Go to blog settings>search preference
  
  
• Click edit and Point Yes to Enable Search Description and enter a brief meta description of your blog there. (max 150 words). Remember it will be your blog's homepage meta description.
  
  
• Click save you are done.

Adding meta description to each post.

1. Go to your Blog Posts and click Add a new post or Edit the existing ones.


2. Click Search Description option under Post settings. (This option appears only after you enabled search description, discussed above)
   
   


3. Enter the meta description for the post and click Done.

You are all done and ready to boost up your search rankings. You can check that these tags are working well on your blog using this tool. Meta Description Checker

Set a custom domain in blogger blog(blogspot)

Most people start their blog or website with blogspot sub-domain.(yourdomain.blogspot.com). Having your own custom domain name is of those thing I always advice blogger to do.

Reason's for having a custom domain name?

• Usually, blogger is likely to overrun by spammers
• Custom domain (your own) you can move from one host to another.
• It looks more professional
• You can have your own email address
• Most website don't like blogspot domain for back link.

How to use custom domain with blogger(blogspot).

If you are a blogger and you want your own domain and continue to use Blogger’s free hosting, follow the guidelines highlighted below;

• Step 1 – Login into your Blogger account.
• Step 2 – Click on “Settings” and then “Basic”.

• Step 3 – Click on “Add a custom domain” under “Blog Address” field in “Publishing” section.

• Step 4 – Key in your domain name in the text box and click “Save”.

 

• Do take note blogs are not to be placed on bare domains (like yourdomain.com). You will need a subdomain, for example, blog.yourdomain.com.
• Step 5 – You will see two CNAME records once the page refreshes.

• Step 6 – You will have to key in both CNAME into your DNS zone.
• Step 7 – Wait for a few hours for the domain to propagate and your new domain will take effect on your Blogger blog.

I have continue to update this article to give you the best blogger/blogspot update. Thanks for reading. Please do note that this article has been writing long again, for update and corrections, please use the comments section. Cheers!